[Satiric Map of New York.] A New Yorker's Idea of the United States of America.

This map is a prime example of the Satiric Geography School of Cartography as practiced by Daniel Wallingford. Together with a companion map, This Map Presents a Bostonian's Idea of the United States of America, Wallingford gently skewered the chauvinism of the inhabitants of Boston and New York.

In this map, an oversized New York dominates the rest of the nation, which is portrayed with a great lack of geographic accuracy. A sidebar at the left of the map entitled "Let Them Speak" is a sample of some of the quotes gathered by the cartographer in his "patient research" of New Yorkers' ideas. Both Wallingford maps build on the concept introduced by John McCutcheon's The New Yorker's Idea of the Map of the United States that appeared in The Chicago Tribune in 1922. In McCutcheon's map, New York is portrayed as an elegant mansion, while the rest of the country serves -- on a much smaller scale -- as "the back yard;" regional specialties are depicted as part of the mansion owner's domain: New England as the schoolhouse, Detroit as the garage and the Midwest as cornfields. Nearly 40 years after the Wallingford maps, Saul Steinberg brought this genre of satiric cartography to a new audience with his celebrated New Yorker cover -- View of the World from Ninth Avenue.

The present map was preceded by at least two smaller, black and white versions (in 1936 and 1937). The 1939 dating of the New York map is based on the addition of the 1939 World's Fair grounds to the previous versions of the map. Scarce. Amusing. [ICN 7484.].